Myownwings
08-20-2010, 04:07 AM
I just found this story, and all I can say is 'wow'....that's what I like to see.
My Treasure Story
The Discovery:
After sorting through and answering numerous private messages, having our phone number changed and moving, I’ve decided to share the story of my treasure find, here’s how it went....
I was out in the woods looking for morel mushrooms (dry land fish) one morning in the latter part of April 2007. It was a cool morning and the ground was still very moist from all the recent rains in our area, and I hoped to return in a few hours with dozens morels to eat for dinner that night. I was walking along looking towards the ground and noticed the remains of an old piece of pottery; it was an old blue and white piece with tiny hairline cracks all over its surface. This caught my attention and I gave the landscape a quick survey and noticed old rusted out buckets, broken mason jars, rusty tin cans and more old junk that suggested I was standing in an old trash dump. I walked upon a small ridge line and looked down and realized that I had stumbled upon an old house foundation complete with the outline of an old stone well, a very large depression (probably a cellar hole) and the remains of an old chimney that was only two or three stones high and covered with thick green moss. I also noticed evidence of very large hand-hewed logs that were also covered in thick moss. It became very clear that a large log home used to sit on this very piece of property. After scraping around with a piece of stick I had found, I discovered more clues indicative of older dwellings from long, long ago. I even noticed a row of Easter lilies arching off into what was now an overgrown briar patch. About an hour went by and after scraping and poking around the stones and logs; I determined that what used to stand here had burned completely to the ground.
I decided to drive back home, pick up my gear and head back out for a more thorough examination with my metal detector. I packed up the Cortes, Leschie, a folding Army entrenching tool and a bottle of water and headed back to the site and continued looking for morels, but also metal detecting the obvious places we’ve all read about in the magazines. I dug a couple rusty iron targets like bucket handles, a chain and what appeared to be a stove leg. I decided to increase my discrimination to eliminate iron and other metallic junk. My next signal indicated “penny†on my LCD, I kneeled down and popped out a 1923 wheat cent.
Over the next hour, I dug two more wheaties, a few nails, a button but nothing spectacular was coming out of the ground. I noticed a large grove of pine trees on the far end of the site, and decided to detect around that area. I was casually walking along half way swinging my coil, not paying too much attention to anything; when the Cortes sounded off with a signal that nearly blew my ears off. At first, I started to disregard the tone as another jar lid or large piece of junk, I glanced down at the LCD readout and it said “lift coil†this normally happens when a large piece of shallow metal is too close to the coil. I decided not to give it much effort and began scraping around with my foot and kicking with the toe of my boot. All of the sudden, I felt my foot crash through some boards and land about six inches below the surface of the ground.
My first thought was “snake†so I jerked my foot out and stepped back out of the way to see what might come slithering out of the hole. I took the coil of my detector and moved one of the boards out of the way hoping the sparse sunlight would enlighten what lay beneath. Nothing came crawling out so I unfolded my entrenching tool into the pick formation and jerked a couple more of the boards out of the way. It reminded me of an old rotted away well cap that someone had hastily covered up and I thought I was mere inches from falling through and landing at the bottom of a deep dark insect, bug and snake infested pit.
I continued removing the boards and cleared out an area surrounding the pitfall; at this point I was sure I had discovered an old well because I noticed the tip of one of those solid red rectangular bricks sticking out of the ground (it was standing straight up on edge). I scraped away the area surrounding the single brick and dug it up, that’s when I hit another brick, this one was lying on its side, I continued to dig around the brick and found out that it was only one of many bricks that formed a complete circle. I continued scraping and digging until I could clearly see the circumference of a complete circle outline of bricks that was approximately three feet across and three top to bottom. I raised the entrenching tool above my shoulders and swung it hard into the center of the brick outline (I still thought it was a well and was going to dig out the cap). When the entrenching tool landed, it made a sound that reminded me of glass breaking. I swung again, this time when the shovel smashed through the ground; I jerked it back towards me, and what happened next is the beginning of every treasure hunters dream. My boots became showered in a mixture of coins and dirt….
I dropped the entrenching tool and stood their looking at my feet, the coins, the brick outlined hole, and what remained of those old rotted away boards, I remembered the upright brick that I'd tossed aside...it was a marker! I dropped to my knees and began digging the center of the hole with my bare hands. I reached to my left hip and took out the Leschie, and began removing soil from the area and carefully clearing out around the crater the entrenching tool had left. I started scooping out double handfuls of dirt with coins mixed in; I placed this dirt aside, picked out the coins and pushed the remaining dirt away. At this point, the hole was approximately eight inches in circumference and about four inches deep.
This is when I noticed pieces of crumbly black plastic mixed in with the excavated soil. I turned the entrenching tool to the side and started scraping from the edge of the bricks towards me, moving the dirt off to the right. When I dug down about four to five inches, I hit thick black plastic, layed down in double sheets, it was old and crumbled, and it broke when I tried to peel or pull on it. One more sweep with the entrenching tool produced a small pile of dirt and hundreds of coins (I would give details of “coinsâ€, but I’ll leave it at that). I raked around with the entrenching tool and scattered amongst the coins were short pieces of what I at first thought were pieces of pipe. But these “pipes†had been neatly wrapped with burlap and tied around with brown twine. I started scooping up handfuls of coins and “pipe†while quoting out loud an array of popular expletives that would make any sailor proud to call me daddy! I was scooping up fistfuls of coins and pushing my fingers down in the mini-vault deeper and deeper, I felt very little dirt and mostly coins as far as I was able to gouge with my stiffened fingers.
I finally picked up one of the shorter pieces of ‘pipe†and looked at it closely, someone had taken the time to wrap this thing like a present, folding the ends like a burrito, and rolling burlap material around it several times, then using short pieces of twine, they had made three ties from top to bottom. The burlap was all but rotted away and the twine crumbled in my fingers, I grabbed the ends firmly and snapped it towards me, breaking it in the middle. At this moment for one of the few times in my life that I can remember, I nearly fainted. What fell through my fingers and landed on my lap and the ground were small yellow nickel-sized disks, they were heavy and there was no doubt in my mind as to what they were. I had only seen these discs in shops, magazines or on the internet and now I knew why they are called the most beautiful coin in the world, coins that wars were fought for and coins that people had died for.
My mind started racing, I began to sweat profusely and I could feel my heart beating through my shirt (remember I have a pacemaker)! I remember being very light headed and I also began to cry uncontrollably, right there in the middle of the woods, their I sat on my knees with both hands still clutching those yellow coins, crying like a baby.
At least five minutes elapsed and the tears stopped just as abruptly and quickly as they had started. I could feel my heart pounding and I knew I had to calm down, I remember thinking about curses, spells, and dying, I thought about someone walking up on me and killing me, my mind raced from one extreme to the next. I looked around for my bottle of water, fumbled for my cigarettes and lighter; I wiped my face and sat their trying to compose myself. I finally stopped shaking and sweating, my heart rate, while still racing, seemed normal enough for me to get myself together and continue on. Panic distinctly set in as I recalled that I had opted not to carry the extra weight of my pistol. I slowly rose to my feet and took a long look around and listened harder than I've ever listened in my life, all I could hear was the sound of my own breathing and the occassional bird chirp. I was all alone and I knew it.
I kneeled back down and picked up the yellow coins and put them in my pants pocket and started raking the coins towards me with both hands. The heavy lengths of burlap “pipe†which I would uncover sporadically were carefully lifted from the mass and gingerly placed at the top of my exhumation to the side, because I had a very good idea of what the burlap contained. I had loosed an incredible pile of coins from the money pit and it finally dawned on me that I had better start getting this stuff out of the woods as quickly as possible before a hunter, mushroom picker or a curiousity seeker stumbled by. I filled my pockets with the burlap cylinders first, then scooped my hat full of coins and cautiously wormed my way back to my vehicle. I sat their in the drivers seat and took long drinks of water and thought of how I could gather this cache and get it back to my car and safely to my house.
I was definitely not prepared for such a find; I had no bags, boxes or anything else which would carry and support a bounty of this magnitude. I removed my tee-shirt and tied off the bottom with shoelaces from my tennis shoes which I had in the trunk, I also removed the seat covers from my vehicle seats. I took these back and literally began shoveling the coin and dirt mixture into my make-shift homemade bags.
The hole was reaching a depth of 18†deep and still a mixture of dirt and coins were coming out by the shovelfuls. I made a couple of trips back to my car dragging my loaded down bags and heaving them into the trunk and front seat floorboard. I needed more bags, so I removed my socks and grabbed a couple old fast food bags which were behind my seat and headed back to the pit. I quickly filled the socks to the top and tied them off with the remaining shoelace and laid them to the side, I filled my hat and the paper bags with what they could hold. I had finally reached the bottom of the hole, there were a dozen or so coins left in the base and I was picking them out one by one. I glanced up wondered if the bottom of this pit was lined with the same rectangular bricks that formed the sides. I wondered if more coins were down their and if it would ever stop. So I turned on the Cortes and made a quick sweep of the bottom and it squeeled loudly and the LCD read lift coil!!! I laid the detector aside and jabbed the bottom with the Leschie and started removing more soil.
The Leschie hit pay dirt, it sounded off with a dull thud right in the center of the hole. I began excavating dirt like a madman and stabbing the digger with dozens of short quick jabs, it was a frantic, wild type of digging and sweat was pouring from my face and dripping off my nose. Finally, what remained was the perfect outline of a wooden coffin about the size of a cigar box; I wiped my face and eyes using the arm of my sweat soaked shirt, and took a closer look. I saw that it was nailed tightly closed with small finishing nails spaced every inch or so apart. I tried to pick it up, but it seemed to be stuck, after multiple strikes with the side and handle of the Leschie, a piece of wood broke off. I started stabbing at it with the business end until the top and left side broke free, and spilled out a sampling of the contents like a thanksgiving cornocopia. I started prying, stabbing and jerking until the lid flew off, after a few more well placed stabs, the box had turned to splinters and the contents revealed.
This wooden crypt was stacked three layers deep with the same burlap and twine bundles which were intermittently mingled into the mass of coins which I had previously excavated. I picked a short fat bundle and started pinching off the burlap, it was tougher than the last ones, and wrapped more tightly, so I remember biting it like a piece of corn-on-the-cob and spitting the material aside like a rabid dog. I ripped into it with my teeth until the ribbed edges of large silver discs scrapped my grill and sent shivers down my spine from the sensation.....and I looked down. Large silver pieces of metal beamed back at me as they finally saw light from their burlap encasement; they looked to be in mint condition with beautiful patina. I picked out another roll and gnawed it open like a rat, this time, yellow discs filled my hands as the young looking Indian with his smooth skin gazed straight ahead, I looked deeply into his hypnotic eye, as he seemed to say well done....
I composed myself and sat down, thinking how crazy this has became and what on earth will I do with this stuff, how will I ever explain it? I quickly removed the rolls and stacked them at the top of the hole; all in all, twenty-two burlap and twine sleeves were recovered from the rotted box. I bloused the legs of my pants tightly into the top of my boots and tied the boot laces tight. I unbuttoned my pants and began filling the leg portions with these rolls; I remember putting ten complete rolls into each leg and the rest in my pants pocket.
I made my way back to the vehicle, unloosed the blouses and spilled the rolls out into the floor board, covered them up with my car mat and made my final trek back to the money pit to collect my gear and clean up the site. The hole was deep as the entrenching tool was, with the shovel folded inwards, and lined with red bricks on the side forming an almost perfect circle. After reaching the bottom, I found that it had been layered with wooden boards which were probably an inch thick. After a series of scans with the Cortes, I was satisfied there were no more signs of large metal in or around the excavation area, there were numerous loose coins laying around, some of which I policed up, but in my haste, I did leave several at the site. I knocked the bricks loose and caved them inward towards the center of the hole, tossed the boards in, and rolled a large rock into the center. I scrapped and dug around until I had it back-filled to its normal, natural surroundings. I was soaking wet from head to toe and physically exhausted.
I went back to my car and started the drive home; I phoned my wife who was out to lunch but left her an urgent message to call home. I then called a friend (a member of Treasure Net) and told him of my good fortune and invited him to my location to take a look and share in my metallic harvest, but he was too busy working. LOL
I pulled into my driveway and started unloading through my back door, straight into our bath tub. After a good bath (and clogging up the drain several times), it was clean enough to see the true magnitude of my find. I sat their in the chair and watched the shower water beat and splash all over my financial freedom. I was startled out of my daze by our phone ringing, it was my wife, I wouldn’t give her any details over the phone but persuaded her to come home early. When she arrived and stepped into the bathroom, she asked if I was alright. Without saying a word, I motioned my head towards the bathtub, she sat on the side of our tub and remained silent for about two minutes, we both just stared and almost became hypnotized by the sound of the shower water splashing and beating about. She finally broke the silence by crying, she came over to the chair and put her arms around me, sat on my lap and we cried together.
After the emotions, we gathered our senses and some gentle cleaning supplies and started to work. We temporarily rearranged our living room so we could spread out two sheets in the middle of the floor in order to have a place to stack and sort once the harvest was all washed and dried. We took pictures…
The Aftermath:
Paranoia, fear, excitement, worry and every other human emotion were surging through our souls that afternoon. A few quick internet searches to check out some of the yellow coins, made it obvious that we needed to bring in other people. We have a family member who is an attorney, and another friend of the family who owns a shop, so we decided to give them a call (it was already after 9:00pm). After hearing our story, they drove three hours one way to reach our home and when they walked in they were absolutely astonished as what we had spread out in our living room floor and on the cocktail table, piled up in bowls and spread out on dinner plates.
We made coffee, ate pastries and sat up all night talking and laughing, considering and conceiving different scenarios, options, and stories. We took much of their advice, some of which made sense at the time, but now I truly regret.
One of the smaller things I would not do, but at the time, and in our emotional confusion coupled with suspicion, paranoia and every other emotion you can imagine, we deleted our only proof and photographic evidence of this magnificent discovery…yep, we deleted our files.
1. If you stumble upon “real treasure†the urge to tell someone becomes absolutely overwhelming, keeping your mouth shut sounds easy - until it happens to you.
2. I’ll never look at old foundations in the same way again (just checking around outhouses, walkways, chimneys, wells, cellar holes, etc) these are good places, but you never know what may be buried in the south 40.
3. Don’t get in a hurry to “turn them over†take your time and get the best price possible.
Happy Hunting and God Bless EVERYBODY!
Tim
My Treasure Story
The Discovery:
After sorting through and answering numerous private messages, having our phone number changed and moving, I’ve decided to share the story of my treasure find, here’s how it went....
I was out in the woods looking for morel mushrooms (dry land fish) one morning in the latter part of April 2007. It was a cool morning and the ground was still very moist from all the recent rains in our area, and I hoped to return in a few hours with dozens morels to eat for dinner that night. I was walking along looking towards the ground and noticed the remains of an old piece of pottery; it was an old blue and white piece with tiny hairline cracks all over its surface. This caught my attention and I gave the landscape a quick survey and noticed old rusted out buckets, broken mason jars, rusty tin cans and more old junk that suggested I was standing in an old trash dump. I walked upon a small ridge line and looked down and realized that I had stumbled upon an old house foundation complete with the outline of an old stone well, a very large depression (probably a cellar hole) and the remains of an old chimney that was only two or three stones high and covered with thick green moss. I also noticed evidence of very large hand-hewed logs that were also covered in thick moss. It became very clear that a large log home used to sit on this very piece of property. After scraping around with a piece of stick I had found, I discovered more clues indicative of older dwellings from long, long ago. I even noticed a row of Easter lilies arching off into what was now an overgrown briar patch. About an hour went by and after scraping and poking around the stones and logs; I determined that what used to stand here had burned completely to the ground.
I decided to drive back home, pick up my gear and head back out for a more thorough examination with my metal detector. I packed up the Cortes, Leschie, a folding Army entrenching tool and a bottle of water and headed back to the site and continued looking for morels, but also metal detecting the obvious places we’ve all read about in the magazines. I dug a couple rusty iron targets like bucket handles, a chain and what appeared to be a stove leg. I decided to increase my discrimination to eliminate iron and other metallic junk. My next signal indicated “penny†on my LCD, I kneeled down and popped out a 1923 wheat cent.
Over the next hour, I dug two more wheaties, a few nails, a button but nothing spectacular was coming out of the ground. I noticed a large grove of pine trees on the far end of the site, and decided to detect around that area. I was casually walking along half way swinging my coil, not paying too much attention to anything; when the Cortes sounded off with a signal that nearly blew my ears off. At first, I started to disregard the tone as another jar lid or large piece of junk, I glanced down at the LCD readout and it said “lift coil†this normally happens when a large piece of shallow metal is too close to the coil. I decided not to give it much effort and began scraping around with my foot and kicking with the toe of my boot. All of the sudden, I felt my foot crash through some boards and land about six inches below the surface of the ground.
My first thought was “snake†so I jerked my foot out and stepped back out of the way to see what might come slithering out of the hole. I took the coil of my detector and moved one of the boards out of the way hoping the sparse sunlight would enlighten what lay beneath. Nothing came crawling out so I unfolded my entrenching tool into the pick formation and jerked a couple more of the boards out of the way. It reminded me of an old rotted away well cap that someone had hastily covered up and I thought I was mere inches from falling through and landing at the bottom of a deep dark insect, bug and snake infested pit.
I continued removing the boards and cleared out an area surrounding the pitfall; at this point I was sure I had discovered an old well because I noticed the tip of one of those solid red rectangular bricks sticking out of the ground (it was standing straight up on edge). I scraped away the area surrounding the single brick and dug it up, that’s when I hit another brick, this one was lying on its side, I continued to dig around the brick and found out that it was only one of many bricks that formed a complete circle. I continued scraping and digging until I could clearly see the circumference of a complete circle outline of bricks that was approximately three feet across and three top to bottom. I raised the entrenching tool above my shoulders and swung it hard into the center of the brick outline (I still thought it was a well and was going to dig out the cap). When the entrenching tool landed, it made a sound that reminded me of glass breaking. I swung again, this time when the shovel smashed through the ground; I jerked it back towards me, and what happened next is the beginning of every treasure hunters dream. My boots became showered in a mixture of coins and dirt….
I dropped the entrenching tool and stood their looking at my feet, the coins, the brick outlined hole, and what remained of those old rotted away boards, I remembered the upright brick that I'd tossed aside...it was a marker! I dropped to my knees and began digging the center of the hole with my bare hands. I reached to my left hip and took out the Leschie, and began removing soil from the area and carefully clearing out around the crater the entrenching tool had left. I started scooping out double handfuls of dirt with coins mixed in; I placed this dirt aside, picked out the coins and pushed the remaining dirt away. At this point, the hole was approximately eight inches in circumference and about four inches deep.
This is when I noticed pieces of crumbly black plastic mixed in with the excavated soil. I turned the entrenching tool to the side and started scraping from the edge of the bricks towards me, moving the dirt off to the right. When I dug down about four to five inches, I hit thick black plastic, layed down in double sheets, it was old and crumbled, and it broke when I tried to peel or pull on it. One more sweep with the entrenching tool produced a small pile of dirt and hundreds of coins (I would give details of “coinsâ€, but I’ll leave it at that). I raked around with the entrenching tool and scattered amongst the coins were short pieces of what I at first thought were pieces of pipe. But these “pipes†had been neatly wrapped with burlap and tied around with brown twine. I started scooping up handfuls of coins and “pipe†while quoting out loud an array of popular expletives that would make any sailor proud to call me daddy! I was scooping up fistfuls of coins and pushing my fingers down in the mini-vault deeper and deeper, I felt very little dirt and mostly coins as far as I was able to gouge with my stiffened fingers.
I finally picked up one of the shorter pieces of ‘pipe†and looked at it closely, someone had taken the time to wrap this thing like a present, folding the ends like a burrito, and rolling burlap material around it several times, then using short pieces of twine, they had made three ties from top to bottom. The burlap was all but rotted away and the twine crumbled in my fingers, I grabbed the ends firmly and snapped it towards me, breaking it in the middle. At this moment for one of the few times in my life that I can remember, I nearly fainted. What fell through my fingers and landed on my lap and the ground were small yellow nickel-sized disks, they were heavy and there was no doubt in my mind as to what they were. I had only seen these discs in shops, magazines or on the internet and now I knew why they are called the most beautiful coin in the world, coins that wars were fought for and coins that people had died for.
My mind started racing, I began to sweat profusely and I could feel my heart beating through my shirt (remember I have a pacemaker)! I remember being very light headed and I also began to cry uncontrollably, right there in the middle of the woods, their I sat on my knees with both hands still clutching those yellow coins, crying like a baby.
At least five minutes elapsed and the tears stopped just as abruptly and quickly as they had started. I could feel my heart pounding and I knew I had to calm down, I remember thinking about curses, spells, and dying, I thought about someone walking up on me and killing me, my mind raced from one extreme to the next. I looked around for my bottle of water, fumbled for my cigarettes and lighter; I wiped my face and sat their trying to compose myself. I finally stopped shaking and sweating, my heart rate, while still racing, seemed normal enough for me to get myself together and continue on. Panic distinctly set in as I recalled that I had opted not to carry the extra weight of my pistol. I slowly rose to my feet and took a long look around and listened harder than I've ever listened in my life, all I could hear was the sound of my own breathing and the occassional bird chirp. I was all alone and I knew it.
I kneeled back down and picked up the yellow coins and put them in my pants pocket and started raking the coins towards me with both hands. The heavy lengths of burlap “pipe†which I would uncover sporadically were carefully lifted from the mass and gingerly placed at the top of my exhumation to the side, because I had a very good idea of what the burlap contained. I had loosed an incredible pile of coins from the money pit and it finally dawned on me that I had better start getting this stuff out of the woods as quickly as possible before a hunter, mushroom picker or a curiousity seeker stumbled by. I filled my pockets with the burlap cylinders first, then scooped my hat full of coins and cautiously wormed my way back to my vehicle. I sat their in the drivers seat and took long drinks of water and thought of how I could gather this cache and get it back to my car and safely to my house.
I was definitely not prepared for such a find; I had no bags, boxes or anything else which would carry and support a bounty of this magnitude. I removed my tee-shirt and tied off the bottom with shoelaces from my tennis shoes which I had in the trunk, I also removed the seat covers from my vehicle seats. I took these back and literally began shoveling the coin and dirt mixture into my make-shift homemade bags.
The hole was reaching a depth of 18†deep and still a mixture of dirt and coins were coming out by the shovelfuls. I made a couple of trips back to my car dragging my loaded down bags and heaving them into the trunk and front seat floorboard. I needed more bags, so I removed my socks and grabbed a couple old fast food bags which were behind my seat and headed back to the pit. I quickly filled the socks to the top and tied them off with the remaining shoelace and laid them to the side, I filled my hat and the paper bags with what they could hold. I had finally reached the bottom of the hole, there were a dozen or so coins left in the base and I was picking them out one by one. I glanced up wondered if the bottom of this pit was lined with the same rectangular bricks that formed the sides. I wondered if more coins were down their and if it would ever stop. So I turned on the Cortes and made a quick sweep of the bottom and it squeeled loudly and the LCD read lift coil!!! I laid the detector aside and jabbed the bottom with the Leschie and started removing more soil.
The Leschie hit pay dirt, it sounded off with a dull thud right in the center of the hole. I began excavating dirt like a madman and stabbing the digger with dozens of short quick jabs, it was a frantic, wild type of digging and sweat was pouring from my face and dripping off my nose. Finally, what remained was the perfect outline of a wooden coffin about the size of a cigar box; I wiped my face and eyes using the arm of my sweat soaked shirt, and took a closer look. I saw that it was nailed tightly closed with small finishing nails spaced every inch or so apart. I tried to pick it up, but it seemed to be stuck, after multiple strikes with the side and handle of the Leschie, a piece of wood broke off. I started stabbing at it with the business end until the top and left side broke free, and spilled out a sampling of the contents like a thanksgiving cornocopia. I started prying, stabbing and jerking until the lid flew off, after a few more well placed stabs, the box had turned to splinters and the contents revealed.
This wooden crypt was stacked three layers deep with the same burlap and twine bundles which were intermittently mingled into the mass of coins which I had previously excavated. I picked a short fat bundle and started pinching off the burlap, it was tougher than the last ones, and wrapped more tightly, so I remember biting it like a piece of corn-on-the-cob and spitting the material aside like a rabid dog. I ripped into it with my teeth until the ribbed edges of large silver discs scrapped my grill and sent shivers down my spine from the sensation.....and I looked down. Large silver pieces of metal beamed back at me as they finally saw light from their burlap encasement; they looked to be in mint condition with beautiful patina. I picked out another roll and gnawed it open like a rat, this time, yellow discs filled my hands as the young looking Indian with his smooth skin gazed straight ahead, I looked deeply into his hypnotic eye, as he seemed to say well done....
I composed myself and sat down, thinking how crazy this has became and what on earth will I do with this stuff, how will I ever explain it? I quickly removed the rolls and stacked them at the top of the hole; all in all, twenty-two burlap and twine sleeves were recovered from the rotted box. I bloused the legs of my pants tightly into the top of my boots and tied the boot laces tight. I unbuttoned my pants and began filling the leg portions with these rolls; I remember putting ten complete rolls into each leg and the rest in my pants pocket.
I made my way back to the vehicle, unloosed the blouses and spilled the rolls out into the floor board, covered them up with my car mat and made my final trek back to the money pit to collect my gear and clean up the site. The hole was deep as the entrenching tool was, with the shovel folded inwards, and lined with red bricks on the side forming an almost perfect circle. After reaching the bottom, I found that it had been layered with wooden boards which were probably an inch thick. After a series of scans with the Cortes, I was satisfied there were no more signs of large metal in or around the excavation area, there were numerous loose coins laying around, some of which I policed up, but in my haste, I did leave several at the site. I knocked the bricks loose and caved them inward towards the center of the hole, tossed the boards in, and rolled a large rock into the center. I scrapped and dug around until I had it back-filled to its normal, natural surroundings. I was soaking wet from head to toe and physically exhausted.
I went back to my car and started the drive home; I phoned my wife who was out to lunch but left her an urgent message to call home. I then called a friend (a member of Treasure Net) and told him of my good fortune and invited him to my location to take a look and share in my metallic harvest, but he was too busy working. LOL
I pulled into my driveway and started unloading through my back door, straight into our bath tub. After a good bath (and clogging up the drain several times), it was clean enough to see the true magnitude of my find. I sat their in the chair and watched the shower water beat and splash all over my financial freedom. I was startled out of my daze by our phone ringing, it was my wife, I wouldn’t give her any details over the phone but persuaded her to come home early. When she arrived and stepped into the bathroom, she asked if I was alright. Without saying a word, I motioned my head towards the bathtub, she sat on the side of our tub and remained silent for about two minutes, we both just stared and almost became hypnotized by the sound of the shower water splashing and beating about. She finally broke the silence by crying, she came over to the chair and put her arms around me, sat on my lap and we cried together.
After the emotions, we gathered our senses and some gentle cleaning supplies and started to work. We temporarily rearranged our living room so we could spread out two sheets in the middle of the floor in order to have a place to stack and sort once the harvest was all washed and dried. We took pictures…
The Aftermath:
Paranoia, fear, excitement, worry and every other human emotion were surging through our souls that afternoon. A few quick internet searches to check out some of the yellow coins, made it obvious that we needed to bring in other people. We have a family member who is an attorney, and another friend of the family who owns a shop, so we decided to give them a call (it was already after 9:00pm). After hearing our story, they drove three hours one way to reach our home and when they walked in they were absolutely astonished as what we had spread out in our living room floor and on the cocktail table, piled up in bowls and spread out on dinner plates.
We made coffee, ate pastries and sat up all night talking and laughing, considering and conceiving different scenarios, options, and stories. We took much of their advice, some of which made sense at the time, but now I truly regret.
One of the smaller things I would not do, but at the time, and in our emotional confusion coupled with suspicion, paranoia and every other emotion you can imagine, we deleted our only proof and photographic evidence of this magnificent discovery…yep, we deleted our files.
1. If you stumble upon “real treasure†the urge to tell someone becomes absolutely overwhelming, keeping your mouth shut sounds easy - until it happens to you.
2. I’ll never look at old foundations in the same way again (just checking around outhouses, walkways, chimneys, wells, cellar holes, etc) these are good places, but you never know what may be buried in the south 40.
3. Don’t get in a hurry to “turn them over†take your time and get the best price possible.
Happy Hunting and God Bless EVERYBODY!
Tim